BabyCam, 'set to end over the shoulder child monitoring' / Brand New, 'thoughts on brands and communications'. See also Mediameld. These are quasi-professional weblogs, open musings from those working in the field of visual communications / Slowly She Turned also has an agenda, 'simple living, slow food, and sustainability' / the big loader, or why kids like diggers / the puppet jungle will sell you just about every type of glove puppet / active suspension, a record label with neat animations.

Cabinet Magazine, things' favourite paper publication, is coming to London's Barbican Gallery for a talk tomorrow night (July 29th). Cabinet editor Christopher Turner will speak on 'Chromophilia', an event held in conjunction with the current exhibition, 'Colour after Klein'. We can't make it, sadly, but the topics sound fascinating (and very 'Cabinet'), including the history of Spectro-Chrome therapy, and some Cabinet-produced films on the history of mauve, Gertrude Jekyll's colour schemes and early colour photography, the camouflage theories of painter Abbott Handerson Thayer and the Spinal Tap-esque Superblack, 'the darkest color ever created.' The press release also notes intriguingly that 'the event will feature the mass administration of the outdated Luscher Color Personality test and possibly also include a discussion of chicken contact lenses.'

Will Battersea Power Station's chimneys have to be knocked down and replaced? It seems a shame, as the chimneys are a defining element of the original structure, and even with like-for-like replicas the building edges just one step further towards total pastiche. It serves the developers well to re-build the chimneys, as plans like single seat restaurants and observation platforms will be far easier to pull off inside nice modern structures.

Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order is an epic four-volume tome presenting an all-encompassing theory of architecture. Centred around the concepts of 'living structure' and 'living processes' - organically-derived concepts that conform to human scale and traditional methods - Alexander believes contemporary architecture is 'arbitrary' and essentially damaging. More intriguingly, one of his quotes reads '...I believe he is likely to be remembered most of all, in the end, for having produced the first credible proof of the existence of God...', although Alexander's definition of God doesn't necessarily tally with the traditional view.

At times, it seems like those who lionise the contemporary architecture of the 80 years suffer from some kind of social compulsion, deliberately going against the prevailing flow of opinion. The richly ironic fact is that what was intended to be an architecture for the masses is now strictly a minority pursuit. The Modern House is a new niche estate agent, specialising in connecting contemporary architecture with its compulsive fans. Admittedly, being a niche interest it means that all too often contemporary houses are seen as fodder for redevelopment, tear-downs that developers know very few will miss.

Bad Mags (via Ashley B). Why is the web such a fine repository for trash culture? Perhaps scanning and uploading and thing somehow flushes out the essential seediness, leaving behind a pixel-thin veneer of irony. It suits the low-attention span era to strip (bad choice of word, perhaps) the cultural back story out of images and objects, flattening their meaning to an instant flash of recognition and/or delight. The things we talk about at things are increasingly not objects in the traditional sense, but the traces left behind by the objects we remember, traces people have taken time and effort to recover and re-present. Or, more likely, they are a new breed of objects. Devices for collating and controlling an ever-increasing volume of music and images, or places that exist only in silicon, or cabinets of curiosity that have no physical form, no sense of wholeness, collections that take up no space.

Want a distraction when travelling on the tube? You can always knit (via importdisappoint). Related, a post-bombing tube map, one more for the collection (via Boing Boing). Hopefully out of date already.

The Observer launches a technology magazine this Sunday (24th July), takings its complement of glossy supplements to four, the others being food, music and sport. They've been broadly influential across all swathes of that which we call culture, representing the apex of a particular kind of middle class smorgasbord of lifestyle and consumption, reducing everything to a series of well-marketed tick-boxes, be it an 'edgy' new CD, promising young sportswoman, or 'undiscovered' soft cheese. They're a bit like amazon's recommendations system, except in print and slightly more over-bearing.

One of the smallest NY apartment goes on sale (via curbed). 'Compact and bijou, Mostyn, compact and bijou. (a phrase that came into popular usage from adland). London has more than its fair share of overpriced rabbit hutches, as the rabid enthusiasm that greeted Piercy Conner'smicroflat concept from 2002 indicated. But as Hugh Pearman noted, the microflat down-graded the home from a spatial concept to little more than a consumable object, an over-the-counter gadget, the iPod of housing. In fact, had the architects waited a few months until the iPod (launched 23 October 2001) had taken off, popularising the idea of cultural compartmentalizing, their idea might have garnered more than widespread media interest and would perhaps even have been realised. Meanwhile, a site of great historic literary interest - and much human misery - gets the makeover treatment.

More ingenuity harnessed in the name of commerce: the Shadow billboard is designed, quite literally, to only make sense when the sun comes out. The image, which advertises a brand of sunscreen, is composed of hundreds of small raised aluminium posts. When the sun is out and in the right place, the cast shadows form the image - a sunbathing woman. Interactive billboards aren't new - a while ago an environmental group put up a poster at, I think, Vauxhall Cross: it started out completely blank, and then as the days went by a message appeared as dark sooty particles accumulated on the surface, clinging to special glue.

Perhaps surprisingly, contemporary London isn't as festooned with billboards as it was in the Victorian era, when advertising pervaded every nook and cranny. This extract from Successful Advertising (1885) gives ten reasons when to stop advertising, one of which is: "When every man has become so thoroughly a creature of habit that he will certainly buy this year where he bought last year." As a result, public spaces were a riot of posters, all hawking this and that, in a totally unregulated, and unscrupulous market. Yet there has to be a happy medium between billboards so clever they detract totally from the experience of the sights, smells, people and activity of the city behind them (quite literally, as in the billboard photos of Stephen Gill) and the Delete! project, which stripped out all extraneous white noise from advertising in a single street in Vienna - creating a rather oppressive, dull space.

Simulated society may generate virtual culture, a New Scientist piece on the intention to simulate a community of 1,000 'intelligent' agents, observing how social groupings and structures emerge through the creation of simple tasks. The NEW-TIES project (wait for it, New and Emergent World models Through Individual, Evolutionary, and Social Learning. That's the kind of acronymn that was arrived at during an uninspired night at the pub) is a bit like The Sims but without humans to contaminate the gel in the petri dish. Other scientists scoff at the idea, which will include characters and environments modelled using Counter Strike to ensure it looks accessible and interesting for human observers. One Edward Castronava is quoted as saying, "The most sensible research project, it seems to me, would be to study [real human societies that grow up on their own within computer-generated fantasy worlds], rather than conjure artificial ones." Castranova has a proposal for a "university-based synthetic world", which he calls Arden. Smacks a bit of Live As a Tudor to me.

Domus magazine has launched an open competition for 'Ideas on architecture and geopolitics for the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang', a virtual competition, if you like, as a means of engaging with North Korea. More details (free registration required). The unfinished hotel looms over the city - the print edition of the magazine contains some quite spectacular photography. While not quite a symbolic icon along the lines of the Empire State, the Eiffel Tower or even the Gherkin, the building is nonetheless gaining a cult following in the West, with its own Wikipedia entry and even appearing in video games (the chipper-sounding Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction). We referenced it last year via this city tour.

Entertaining monster tooth find at Loch Ness is, inevitably, a hoax. It's most likely an attempt to create some buzz around The Loch, a new(ish) novel by Steve ('Two Words: Jurassic Shark!') Alten. From reader reviews of Meg, his first monstrous shark epic: 'I loved Jaws (film and book) but for me Meg is better. Jaws was a 25ft Shark, times that by two and a bit and you have Meg. Steve Alten has obviously researched his subject'. Embarrassingly enough, I think I've actually read it... Sadly, even the most famous picture of Nessie, the Surgeon's Photograph, was unveiled as a hoax some 60 years after it was taken. Yet people still want to believe. 'Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S', was the unfortunate anagram of Nessiteras rhombopteryx, the Greek name enthusiastically given to the monster by the naturalist Peter Scott (who did fine work setting up the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust when he wasn't pursuing the lost plesiosaur with a diamond-shaped fin). Original link via me-fi.

Dawkins' point was that humankind has done a fine job of creating 'middle worlds,' realities that make sense of the immense complexity that surrounds us through essential simplification. The universe is made up of countless billions of things, yet as humans we can only perceive things of a certain scale, those that are not too large and not too small, and this is the 'middle world' we inhabit. Haldane, a keen entomologist, speculated that the larger an organism gets, the more complex it becomes, what has come to be known as Haldane's Principle (Haldane, a quotable chap, also coined the word 'clone'). Others, most notably Jane Jacobs, applied this principle to organisational systems, arguing that complexity doesn't make things big, but bigness makes things complex. That's not to say complexity doesn't occur on the microscopic scale: Haldane was once asked what his research had led him to think about God. 'He must have an inordinate fondness for beetles,' he replied. Not to mention beetle horns.

*

Other things. Oskar goes nuts, a weblog / someone pointed out to us yesterday that the current things colour scheme is far from ideal if you suffer from protanopia, deutanopia or tritanopia - colour blindness. Try using the Colorfilter on the site and you can see the problem. More changes... / Lucy Pringle has a hugely comprehensive website all about crop circles, with conclusive photos like this one of a hostile alien symbol / speed limits go up in some US States / TED Global discusses future cities: apparently 130 people a second move to urban areas around the globe.

'Futuristic luxury homes unveiled' details the proposed scheme for 46 'high-end' architect-designed properties at Lower Mill Estate in the Cotswolds (the Telegraph take on the story was naturally very disapproving). Every now and again a brave developer tries their hand at this kind of high profile scheme, bringing out the architectural big guns and hoping that the project's expected cultural legacy will outweigh any social or environmental concerns. A few years back there were the grand plans for Grafton New Hall (which seems to have been quietly forgotten), while in the US there are the (in)famous Houses at Sagaponac on the Hamptons (which now seems to be downplaying the scale and expense of the 34 houses, hoping they will 'inspire a shift... away from the conventions of endlessly repeated, uninspired traditional designs, which trade art for size').

The idea that one can create ('curate', even) a collection of 'instant icons' is ultimately doing contemporary architecture a disservice as 'good design' becomes associated with big names and even bigger budgets. Also, both the Lower Mill Houses and the Sagaponac schemes are designed as second homes, a construct which practically negates any claim they might have to being 'innovative places to live'. If you don't have to live somewhere all then time, then all sorts of concessions can be made to privacy, convenience, storage, etc. Lower Mill's architectural zoo is also a small part of the site, the majority of which will be covered by competent yet conventional 'contemporary show homes' ('affordably' priced between 295K and 2m UKP, with the architect-branded houses going for up to 10m UKP).

Another argument in favour of such 'iconism' (horrid construction, but can't think of a better word) is that these expressions of the avant-garde helps drive the rest of the world forward, opening up popular taste and encouraging the mass-market to experiment and innovate. The paradox is that by setting themselves apart as exclusive bastions of high-design, these developments risk turning 'contemporary' into the new Neo-Georgian, the gated communities of tomorrow that simply switch pilasters for Priva-lite, and garnering the same kind of distaste.

So what use is the residential avant-garde? This extract from Sudjic's The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful Shape the World tells the tale of a Frank Gehry commission that never was. The Peter Lewis House consumed nearly two decades of the architect's time (in pre-Bilbao, pre-interational jetset days), with an ever-expanding program and spiralling budget that 'kept rising from $5m, to $20m, $65m and even $80m'. As this article in Business Week notes, 'it's hard to know exactly what the Lewis house would have looked like,' but the models that were presented showed the project as a synthesis of Gehry's formal language to date, the 'fish' in Barcelona, the Pop-juxtaposition of smooth and sculptural forms (first seen in the Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen-adorned offices for Chiat/Day in LA from 1991)), and the CATIA-composed cascading metal facades that eventually wound up forming a core part of the architect's current stylistic phase.

Lewis claims, with some justification, that his commission had a major impact on the design for the Bilbao Guggenheim. Although he might feel the need to justify the cultural contribution made by the 'several million dollars' of fees he paid to Gehry, this claim is far from wishful thinking. Gehry has acknowledged how elements of the residential design made it into the conference room of the DG Bank in Berlin, for example, and those hefty fees effectively made Lewis the architect's patron during a lean period. More importantly, their relationship also resulted in the Peter B.Lewis Building at the Weatherhead School of Management in Cleveland, Ohio (2002), so the Lewis House, for all its modernist McMansion pretensions ('a 10-car gallery... storage for his art collection... space for a director... a curator... a library... escape tunnels', etc.) was a giant sketch, a way for Gehry to hone and resolve an aesthetic that has subsequently become famous the world over.

Nonetheless, Sudjic's book is ultimately down on the Lewis House, deeming it the manifestations of a control-freak personality, stating that 'this is the world as I want it. This is the perfect room to run a state, a business empire, a city, a family.' In his Times review of The Edifice Complex (entitled 'Are architects venal, vacuous and ego-driven?'), Jonathan Meades (linked via Veritas et Venustas) describes the book as 'a work of damning apostasy', concluding that the rich and powerful's desire for a built legacy will continue to appeal to architects' vanity over their better judgement. The new 'iconic estates' do little more than allow the privileged to buy into the ongoing illusion of modern architecture as power and taste.

*

Other things. Town planning: How Boston got messed up (via Sachs), a hugely depressing collection of before-and-after images of the effects of Urban Renewal on the city of Boston, focusing on City Hall Plaza. The City Hall is an undeniably imposing building, designed by Kallmann, McKinnell and Knowles, but will forever be tainted by its association with the Boston Redevelopment Agency's clearances policy. Many photos at the Boston History Society's site. From the original Cyburbia link: 'The people in the community never knew what hit them. All of a sudden, they found themselves living in the suburbs. Where there kids had played yuppies now walked their dogs. When they went back to see the place where their childhood home had stood, they couldn't find it. The very streets had disappeared.'

A telling comment on London's multi-culturalism. Related, I wasn't there, I was nowhere near is a good perspective on the tube bombs from little.red.boat: 'If you were nowhere near, and you're ok, marvel in that fact. Not in the fact that if you had left the house two hours earlier and taken a completely non-sensical route, it might have been you, or if you happened to be somewhere you were never likely to be, it could have been you.'

The set of photos at top right this month are all taken from the remarkable Central Building at BMW's LeipzigPlant, designed by Zaha Hadid. When we visited, the attached factory (true to its name, the Hadid building is sandwiched between several vast industrial structures) had just started churning out a limited number of 3-Series BMWs, before production began in earnest. As a result, Hadid's coup de theatre, the overhead conveyor belts, were rather empty - they take finished bodyshells from assembly through to the paint shop, via a storage facility.

The Central Building was beautifully constructed, with concrete surfaces that felt as smooth as satin. Although it fits a tight site and fulfills a complex brief, the building still displays Hadid's deliberate complexity and theatricality, with multiple levels, ramps and views. Even the car park is a delight, a geometric composition of skews and slashes (the studio has a thing about car parks, perhaps intrigued by the ironic possibilities of creating dynamism from hundreds of static objects - see the Terminus Hoenheim in Strasbourg for an earlier example).

Last year we wrote about the challenge of creating complexity as a result of Hadid winning the 2004 Pritzker Prize (video). Was her architecture buildable? Did it rely solely on the initial punch of the computer-aided visualisation? At that point, barely 18 months ago, such was the paucity of her office's built work that many were asking questions about Hadid's ability to translate astonishing graphic skill into real architecture ('She is well known for her inability to translate her ideas into realistic projects, let alone finished buildings,' Clay Risen wrote in New Republic (the piece is archived here).

Recent projects have silenced the doubters, for the most part (perhaps the snipers have moved on to Libeskind?). There was also controversy surrounding the architects' decision - at the client's behest - to do away with artificial ventilation systems. A lot of people stamped their feet about this in rage, the implication being that the company was able to slip under local building regulations in return for bringing much-needed employment and investment to the area (formerly part of East Germany). BMW was certainly betting on a lot of media coverage of their whizzy new building, so much so that Domus magazine ended up running a catty piece on the carefully orchestrated media circus (which was when our photos were taken). Instead of publishing any of the supplied photos (by three separate photographers, all free for editorial use), they stripped everything down to a single black and white spread with random speech bubbles popping out of the assembled journos, architects and media minders, spouting banalities. Part of the problem was BMW's ultra-tight media embargo, which forebade publication before a certain date.

The railway line was the pet project of two classic racing driver eccentrics, Captain JEP Howey and the famous Polish Count, Louis Zborowski. Zborowski, like his father before him, died at the wheel: 'It is said that when he died he was wearing the same cufflinks that had earlier brought about his father Eliot Zborowski's death in 1903, when one of them had become caught up in the hand throttle of his Mercedes during a hill climb at La Turbie.' The younger Zborowski's best known achievement was not the railway, but the creation of the original Chitty Bang Bang (note, only one 'chitty').

According to the official website of the West End Musical, that lyrical name has far from innocent origins: 'The name of the car was actually derived from the words of a bawdy first world war soldier's song. Officers would obtain a weekend pass or chit so they could go to Paris for a couple of days and enjoy the favours of the ladies of the town at their leisure:- 'Chitty - bang bang.' Wikipedia's page on the 1960s film, writing by Ian Fleming, is comprehensive, and here are some location shots. The film was production designed by Ken Adam, better known for his work on the James Bond films. Adam is also the subject of a new book by Christopher Frayling.

London is quiet today, certainly around this particular spot. The tube was running as normal (Victoria line), although it was understandably rather quiet. There's the chatter of a helicopter, possibly circling around Tavistock Place, about half a mile to the east, and the occasional siren. Thanks for all your messages yesterday.

Of course, there are also those virtual realms that use real-life data for the purposes of 'entertainment'; the much maligned (and rightly so) PS2 title The Getaway and its worthless sequel used a simplified London that had been created in the time-honoured way of taking loads and loads of photos (a fansite, since removed, even took the trouble to compare virtual to real). So will the developers, Team Soho, be making this data available to Google? Shame to waste it completely, and there can be little enthusiasm for yet another game about death and destruction in London.

We seem to have an insatiable desire for data about the places we're familiar with. Yet what is apparently even more fascinating are those places we can never go to, be it somewhere like the Holy Loch submarine base, the landscape around Chernobyl, C.M.O.C in North America, etc. etc. It's significant that one of the default places in Google Earth's 'places' folder is Area 51, perhaps one of the most scrutinised 'secret places' in history.

Many, many Found Photos, some of which their owners might be rather uncomfortable to have lost. On the same subject, a word of warning. Never buy a Sharp GX-10 or related products (like those listed at Sharp-World, very much not to be confused with Sharpeworld, which is safe for all consumers), as it will steal all your precious memories into its camera and you will never get them back / we're pretty sure that Vincent didn't have this sort of thing in mind: The Starry Night, an endless zoom. The original painting is at NY Moma.

A gallery of Battersea Power Station, soon to be re-branded The Power Station (good thing, seeing as the new sub-station on nearby Cringle Street manages to spell it 'Batersea' on the sign). Very much not related to this Power Station either. We visited the crumbling site a couple of years ago. A small part of me suspects that the whole regeneration plan is just a big fraud, a giant accounting black hole that funds will be sunk into in perpuity and eventually written off. Here's hoping we're wrong.

Mapping is undergoing a rapid revolution. The past year has seen the general availability of mapping data increase exponentially, culminating in the technological wonder that is Google Earth (the result of the company acquiring a firm called Keyhole). Granted, some have criticised the application (currently in Beta) as little more than showboating, just as the basic Google Maps is fun for getting a new perspective on familiar places. However, the existence of professional editions and public toolkits for Google Earth promise an application of almost limitless power.

Taking the application to its logical conclusion: we will each have a little Google Earth spinning on our desktop (something like this), which expands full screen and becomes the front end for photo albums, address books, route-finding, etc? A PDA version will inevitably be available, putting the world in your pocket (and given ad executives the opportunity to write a 100 cheesy slogans). Imagine combining Google's data with that of the Ordnance Survey, for example (the OS guide their data very carefully, but their glossiest offerings look incredibly dated compared to what the basic Google application can do).

Staying in Turin, you can also take the Italian Job Tour. Apparently the (original) film is not very well known in the city in which it's set, partly because it spends a lot of time being very down on the Mafia (even though the Mafia got to drive beautiful Fiat Dino coupe. Related, architecture in film - modernist locations. Thanks to the joys of Google Maps, I reckon this is the Chemosphere. Related, the location of the garage in Ferris Bueller.

More hidden histories. Boffins create Zombie dogs, screams this News.com.au story (via tmn), triggering a memory of a much, much earlier experiment. This 1940 film, Experiments in the Revival of Organisms, purports to show Russian scientist Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko's experiments with a severed dog's head. Gruesome stuff (download the half-gig mp2 movie if you can stomach it). The comments and ensuing discussion are pretty sure it's fake. After all, Stalin's Russia wasn't exactly a hotbed of scientific accuracy and progress - just ask Alexei. The new research took place at Pittsburgh's Safar Center for Resuscitation Research, which seems like a low-key place to be involved in such Re-Animator-style shenanigans.